Sublime

To argue against an idea honestly, you should argue against the best arguments of the strongest advocates. Arguing against weaker advocates proves nothing, because even the strongest idea will attract weak advocates. If you want to argue against transhumanism or the intelligence explosion, you have to directly challenge the arguments of Nick Bostro

hedge-fund

many secular people who don’t hold any clear religious dogma, but nevertheless want to believe that each human possesses an eternal individual essence

“Millions long for immortality who don’t know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

there is a way to think about the allocation of resources in uncertain environments in an optimal way

Occam’s razor principle, which suggests that, all things being equal, the simplest possible hypothesis is probably the correct one.

Perhaps, rather than painstakingly trying to hand-code the things we care about, we should develop machines that simply observe human behavior and infer our values and desires from that.

If we are in a simulation, then there exists some higher-level being — albeit very different from an all-powerful, benevolent one. But that being is us, or a future version of us.